<Technology>

Here is a photo of my family. I love them more than anything. Images have power, I hope. Normally we try to be pretty private, but in this case I am sharing a photo in the hopes that it might dissuade the next person from throwing a Molotov cocktail at our hou...

We are past the event horizon; the takeoff has started. Humanity is close to building digital superintelligence, and at least so far it’s much less weird than it seems like it should be. Robots are not yet walking the streets, nor are most of us talking to AI all day....

Our mission is to ensure that AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) benefits all of humanity. Systems that start to point to AGI* are coming into view, and so we think it’s important to understand the moment we are in....

The second birthday of ChatGPT was only a little over a month ago, and now we have transitioned into the next paradigm of models that can do complex reasoning....

There are two things from our announcement today I wanted to highlight. First, a key part of our mission is to put very capable AI tools in the hands of people for free (or at a great price)....

Today we did a research launch of DALL•E 2, a new AI tool that can create and edit images from natural language instructions. Most importantly, we hope people love the tool and find it useful. For me, it’s the most delightful thing to play with we’ve created so far....

Almost every company and non-profit working on COVID-19 that I offered to help asked for support with clinical trials—for companies focusing on developing novel drugs, vaccines, and diagnostics, rapidly spinning up trials is one of their biggest bottlenecks....

The most common question prospective startup founders ask is how to get ideas for startups. The second most common question is if you have any ideas for their startup. But giving founders an idea almost always doesn’t work....

There is a lot of advice about how to be a good startup founder. But there isn’t very much about how to be a good startup investor....

I am pretty sure cryptocurrency is here to stay in some form (at least as a store of value, which is the only use case we have seen work at scale so far). There was possibly a time when governments could have totally stopped it, but it feels like that’s in the rearview mirror....

I think I am at least somewhat more productive than average, and people sometimes ask me for productivity tips. So I decided to just write them all down in one place. Compound growth gets discussed as a financial concept, but it works in careers as well, and it is magic....

A popular topic in Silicon Valley is talking about what year humans and machines will merge (or, if not, what year humans will get surpassed by rapidly improving AI or a genetically enhanced species). Most guesses seem to be between 2025 and 2075....

I would like to find and support a slate of candidates for the 2018 California elections, and also to find someone to run a ballot initiative focused on affordable housing in the state. A team of aligned people has a chance to make a real change....

If you want to get funded by YC as a founder in the future, but you don't have a startup that's ready for that yet, joining the YC software team is a great hack to get there.

I'm a strong believer in the importance of the internet in helping people to share knowledge and learn from each other. So I’m delighted to share, on behalf of YC Continuity, that we’re investing alongside Collaborative Fund in Quora. Quora is doing extremely well....

For good and bad, technology has become a central force in all our lives. As members of the community, we're interested in ways in which tech companies can use their collective power to protect privacy, rule of law, freedom of expression, and other fundamental American rights....

The FCC has announced plans to roll back policies on net neutrality, and its new head has indicated he has no plan to stop soon.

Dear YC Community: In response to a comment on Hacker News, I’m going to try writing an annual letter to the YC community with an update on our progress. Our mission is to enable the most innovation of any company in the world in order to make the future great for everyone....

The 2016 US Presidential election feels like the most important one so far in my lifetime. No one able to vote in the US should be sitting this one out—we have a major choice to make.

I'm going to say something very unpopular in my world: Trump is right about some big things. He's right that many Americans are getting screwed by the system. He’s right that the economy is not growing nearly fast enough....

I’m delighted to finally be investing in Asana, which I’ve wanted to do for a long time. One of the things I’ve learned about companies is that 1) clear tasks and goals, 2) clearly communicated, and 3) with clear and frequent measurement are very important to success....

First of all, congrats to Kyle, Dan, and the rest of the Cruise team. You all have made amazing progress and we look forward to seeing more in the future....

We tell startups all the time that they have to grow quickly. That’s true, and very good advice, but I think the current fashion of Silicon Valley startups has taken this to an unhealthy extreme—startups have a weekly growth goal before they really have any st...

At the end of a YC batch, the general consensus among the partners is that about 25% of the companies are on a trajectory that could lead to a multi-billion dollar company. Of course, only a handful of them do. Most go on to be decent or bad....

A lot of us complain about how the government is not very good at technology. The U.S. Digital Service is actually trying to do something about it, by applying the way startups build products to make government services work better for veterans, immigrants, st...

Some of these are probably apocryphal, but making predictions about the limits of technology is really hard: Space travel is utter bilge. - Popular Mechanics, 1949 X-rays are a hoax. - Lord Kelvin, ca....

This is part two of a a two-part post—the first part is here. THE NEED FOR REGULATION Although there has been a lot of discussion about the dangers of machine intelligence recently, there hasn’t been much discussion about what we should try to do to mitigate the threat....

This is going to be a two-part post—one on why machine intelligence is something we should be afraid of, and one on what we should do about it....

In human history, there have been three great technological revolutions and many smaller ones. The three great ones are the agricultural revolution, the industrial revolution, and the one we are now in the middle of—the software revolution....

The most important story of 2014 that most people ignored was the Chinese economy overtaking the US economy. (This is using the purchasing power parity metric, which incorporates differences in the price of goods, but the Chinese economy will overtake on other...

I recently got to be a guest at a FarmLogs board meeting. I was struck by how much of an impact the company was having on the world, and how just a couple of years ago it seemed like they were doing something so small....

I wrote this for the FT, but it's behind a paywall. Since I wrote it, I feel like it's probably ok for me to post it here. The natural state of a start-up is to die; most start-ups require multiple miracles in their early days to escape this fate....

An article came out today in Businessweek about arrogance and Silicon Valley. I thought it was good, but there was one more point I wanted to make. People often accuse people in Silicon Valley of working on things that don’t matter. Often they’re right....

Taking uberX everywhere is now cheaper for me than owning a car (I have an expensive car, so it's not a super fair comparison, but I still think it's interesting)....

When there is a structural reason consumers don’t have freedom of choice, and the free market can’t work, consumers need minimal protection from the government so that they don’t get abused. We need protection from the cable companies to keep the Internet fair and open....

Richard Hamming gave this talk in March of 1986. [1] It's one of the best talks I've ever read and has long impacted how I think about spending my time. I mentioned it to a number of people this weekend who, to my surprise, had never heard of it....

We’d like for Y Combinator to fund more breakthrough technology companies—companies that solve an important problem, have a very long time horizon, and are based on an underlying technological or scientific breakthrough....

I, like everyone else in Silicon Valley, downloaded Secret last week. It's incredibly well done, certainly the best yet of any of the gossip/anonymous apps.

Thanks to technology, people can create more wealth now than ever before, and in twenty years they’ll be able to create more wealth than they can today. Even though this leads to more total wealth, it skews it toward fewer people....

Value is created by doing. It’s easy to forget this. A lot of stuff feels like work—commenting on HN, tweeting, reading about other companies’ funding rounds, grabbing coffee, etc [1]—is not actually work....

All companies that grow really big do so in only one way: people recommend the product or service to other people.

I frequently get asked by non-technical solo founders if I know any potential hacker cofounders they should talk to. These people give a passionate pitch for the idea and a long list of all the hustling they've done, customers they've spoken to, models they've...

One of the most interesting changes in venture capital going on right now is the separation of advice and money. For a very long time, these have been a package deal....

A friend recently asked me for my list of current breakout companies. I made it, and noticed that all of them had only one thing in common....

There’s a lot of debate about whether or not the pace of innovation has slowed, and if so, what that means. After some particularly brutal pitches that felt like Saturday Night Live parodies of startups, I feel compelled to weigh in....

A few years ago, many of the Y Combinator B2B startups wrote tools for the developers in other companies--metrics software, deployment software, monitoring software, build software, development frameworks, etc....

I don't believe that any of the blurry UFO photos are real, for a very simple reason--they all resemble a slightly more advanced version of the the then-current technology and style....

When seated at a table with people you don't know, ask "what are you interested in?" or "what have you been thinking about lately?" instead of "what do you do?"....

TL;DR Without economic growth, democracy doesn’t work because voters occupy a zero-sum system. The first piece of startup wisdom I heard was “increasing your sales will fix all problems”....